Entrepreneur and Co-Founder of http://withattend.com. Gotta order the Model X ;)

Apr 16, 2016

Facebook F8 ~ Beyond Great

An Event Greater than Imagined

10 years… that’s a long time. — Me ;)

In the ever-changing tech world, 1o years is a long time. At previous F8 conferences we got to see what the next year would look like, however on Monday Mark announced what Facebook will be doing 10 years from now. 4.1 Billion was repeated several times at the event and that’s the number of people that aren’t connected to the internet, over the next few years facebook plans on investing heavily on infrastructure to help connect these people in these remote regions of the globe. Messenger was also a very hot topic, in a day you interact with a lot of different businesses. Messenger is going to help streamline this process by allowing you to interact with companies just by sending them a message. Booking an Uber, checking the news and shopping online are only some of the services that messenger is offering today. One thing to keep in mind is that F8 is a developer conference so yes they

Here you can see I can order clothes right through messenger!

announced that all developers will be able to use the “Messenger Platform,” and start building Messenger Bots. If you have used Facebook recently chances are you have seen a Facebook ‘Live’ video. This is essentially Facebook’s brand new take at live streaming, it works just like Periscope! However at the event today Mark also announced that Facebook Live will release an API that allows the user to connect more cameras to Facebook Live, previously you were only able to broadcast off of your iOS or Android device. Facebook has partnered with DJI as well as some other companies and you are now able to fly your drone and broadcast to Facebook in realtime with the Live API!

This drone was hooked up to the Live API, and helped stream the broadcast to viewers online! Photo credits to www.marketingweek.com

This event blew any other “Tech” event that I have gone too out of the water. Facebook realized that for them to continue to grow and build a great ecosystem for their customers they would need to put developers first. Throughout the event, I felt that Facebook was doing a great job of listening to the developers and building products so that developers can best serve their users. One example of a product that doesn’t get a lot of press but is a fantastic product that more developers should use is “Analytics for Apps”. This API allows you to understand your users at a very in-depth level allowing you to best serve your users.

4.1 Billion, is the magic number for Facebook. If they bring all those people online that means everyone no matter where you live, you will have access to The Internet. Let’s remember that Facebook serves just less than half the world, and they are worth over $300 Billion. Imagine if Facebook could deliver on their dream of connecting the whole world, they would be the most powerful company on earth. Let’s move from money to a more technical approach, by installing an app on your phone (Free Basics)

This is what free basics looks like on phones, you can also see all the services ie. “Faces for life”

you will have access to “Services,” some are made by Facebook but most of these are made by developers that create “apps” with very little javascript so their service can load on some of the slowest connections. For entrepreneurs this could be big, entrepreneurs that join the free basics platform would be able to get their app out to a lot of people that are coming onto the internet for the first time, this could be huge as you would have access to a brand new market that no one has ever built apps for in the past.

While I was at the F8 Conference I got a lot of video footage on Snapchat, if you weren’t able to tune in live please catch up with the video under here.

Here you can see some footage that I put up on Snapchat. This was all put up on the StartupTV Snapchat account!